


Sleaping in a Chair by the Ocean

by thepizzaman



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Bisexual Lance (Voltron), F/M, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Lance (Voltron) Has PTSD, Lance (Voltron)-centric, Lance's family - Freeform, Langst, M/M, Panic Attacks, Pining Lance (Voltron), Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, eventual Klance, his mom and older brother, i love my boy and I'm making it worse than better again
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-17
Updated: 2017-10-17
Packaged: 2019-01-18 13:36:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12389148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepizzaman/pseuds/thepizzaman
Summary: Lance doesn't want to leave things like this, but something stirs in him, beckoning him back to that house on the hill - to his family, his aunts and uncles, his cousins; his Mama. But Lance quickly learns that while he was finished with the war, the war wasn't finished with him.About five years after the blue lion led them to the castle of lions, the war against the galra is won and the paladins are allowed back on earth, and the red lion takes Lance home.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey fuckers guess whose got two thumgs and is writing another short boy instead of finishing the lost paladin? This guy!!!!'
> 
> But in all seriousness I'm ONCE AGAIN not satisfied with my boy Lance in season four, and I happen to have this idea rummaging around in my head so.... enjoy .?

The touch down to earth was the true hero's welcome Lance always boasted about receiving. The five paladins, Shiro, Coran, and Matt stepped down the descending ramp from the castle-ship to the arms of thousand of earth citizens cheering and screaming under blue skies and fireworks. Waiting for them at the bottom, unchanging, were admirals from the academy - Iverson among them like guilty stone. Stepping off the metal of the ship and onto earth soil was beyond a religious experience, each native looking between themselves with the grandest of smiles spreading across their faces, tears pricking in the corners of Matt and Katie's eyes as they exchanged looks and pulled each other closer. Lance looked over and gave her a wink that she reciprocated gracefully.

The final battle had been gruesome, and the earth battalions had joined the fight at the last minuets, citizens gathered themselves to fight incoming Galran invaders. Lotor thought that Earth would be a soft spot, but the empire was spread so thin it was laughable to watch the torn-silk prince land on earthen cities to be encountered with the wrath of their rebellious inhabitants. With the rebel forces at their backs and voltron in the middle - the win was guaranteed. And when Lotor fell to his knees around his burning empire, screaming at his final slayer, the relief that came over all of them came on the wings of a grand cheer of victory heard throughout the galaxy.

The galra had been defeated. The war was won.

So here stood those that headed the war, on a grand stage in front of half the world, smiling like idiots.

"On this day. We celebrate more than the victory of a war, but the victory of our species, and the victory of the families made along the way. On this day, we look for more than reconstruction, but connection and stability, of a new and broader form of peace spreading through out our galaxy and beyond. On this day, we honor more than the dead," the general of the galaxy garrison turned to Shiro, offering him an apologetic grin as he faced the crowd before him, addressing the gathering as separate commanders approached each of their space-bound counterparts with metals of valor clasped in their hands, "we honor the living, and the hero's they have become. I present to the people of earth: the paladins of Voltron, the princes of Altea, the generals of the rebellion; the defenders of the universe."

Each badge was placed on each hero, glittering brighter than the days to come.

A shout came from the front of the audience, screeching for Katie and her brother. Distracted from the glory, Pidge looked about her rampantly, recognizing the voice she called back. Seeing Mrs. Holt come shoving out of the crowd, reaching for her children looking like she had been crying nonstop since they disappeared. The two siblings shoved passed the commanders blatantly unprofessionally and launched themselves into the crowd calling for their mother. The three collided with joyous laughter and hugs that were long overdue.

Lance laughed with them, and the crowd cheered. For a moment, at least, it seemed like everything would be what it felt: just fine.

\--

Shiro and Allura got married in the coming weeks amongst the unruliness of reconstructing an entire universe, negotiating peace with the remaining galrans and finding a place for them and the blade to settle and reconfigure, and creating peaceful connections between earth and the other alien planets they met along the way, there was matrimony. Lance was relentless with the pictures: plastering the mostly unused cockpit of red with the results. The two were so happy it was almost painful. Every time Lance looked at the picture hanging in the corner of his control panel (next the the one of the entire team) of Shiro and Allura smashing cake in each other's faces he felt a pang of loneliness. He had been avoiding Keith since they got back, not wanting to confront the black paladin about his feelings for him before he left for the beach and most likely never returned. And when the day finally came that they all separated for real, when Hunk when back to Samoa and Pidge moved back into her apartment and Shiro, Allura, and Keith eloped into the government, the words where just there on the tip of his tongue alongside the kiss lance longed to dish out.

But there was none of that. Lance was in his regular clothes with a duffle of his collections from the castle ship slung over his shoulder, Keith was adorning a military outfit, and Hunk was crying, and all Lance did was clap the man he once considered his nemesis turned leader and friend on the back, turn, and leave.

He should have said something. But god forbid.

He should have said something. But he didn't.

He climbed into red and let Keith's face disappear behind the lions closing mouth. The flight to the small Hawaiian beach his family had moved to was more than depressing, nerve wracking, filled with regret - it was terrifying.

Above Colorado, Lance and Hunk broke formation, biding each other goodbye for the time being through a simple glance out of the lions eye.

Lance wanted to scream and kick himself. He was such an idiot.

\--

Landing on the desolate beach created an enormous racket, blowing the trees and the sand like a hurricane. So much for a surprise.

Lance didn't bother with shields or formalities, he stepped out of red's mouth and left her standing on the beach as he looked up to the dunes between him and his house. A small and dirty white fence led from the beginning of the tall grasses at the edge of the sand up a long hill at the top of which sat an old house that didn't stand out at all, didn't mean anything but the world. The biggest reason Lance fought this war was situated in front of him, with clothes flapping gently in the breeze on clothes lines overlooking the ocean, with towels drying on the fence and the old shack sitting unused on beach just a few meters away.

Lance walked, opening the tiny gate between him and the backyard, it squeaked as it opened, lance brushed his hand over the green sand-bucket on the fence huffing a laugh.

The lawn was unmowed, patchy in spots with sand. The yard was littered with lawn chairs and trinkets. A laundry basket sat under the clothes line. The tropical trees that bent and creaked around the property waved Lance his welcome home. The brass doornob was scratched and dented from all the coming and going, tilted slightly as if it was about to fall off. There was a sign on the front door that graced the house with a small blessing in Spanish, a baseball hat sat over it, grappling the hook.

Lance pulled the spare key he had inside his jacket pocket and unlocked the bolt.

When he was here. No one ever locked the door. It was common knowledge that one should never lock a door. To his mama, locking a door was like cursing someone you never met. It was close to a sin. Their family always believed that everyone was a friend until proven otherwise. Everyone was welcome in their household, from their neighbors to their most distant cousins, to the mailman who had thanksgiving dinner with them one year.

When the family moved out, locking the door before they left must have been one of the hardest things any of them had every had to do.

The door opened to silence. A little bit of dust moved from the top, smoothing out a path where it swung. No one came rushing to greet him, but the house was not cold, and the laughter still bounced around the walls, filling the floorboards with light. Lance placed his Keys on the table beside the door, removed his shoes and hung up his jacket. He didn't see the shrine sitting for him, the candles that hadn't been lit in a long time, the dead flowers, the picture of him with a crack running through it. There was dust everywhere, but Lance paid no mind.

He went to the closet down the hall and pulled out a pare of sandals, slipping them on as if he had just come home from a long days work. He stopped to glance into a mirror sitting over a small shelf at the end of the hall. He looked at the man staring back at him: at the stubble crawling down his jaw, at his hair only slightly shorter on the sides.

He moved to the kitchen where a pot of vegetables boiled on the stove, uncooked meat sat chopped and seasoned on a chopping block on the kitchen island.

Lance reached up and pulled a sauté pan off the rack hanging from the ceiling, placing it on the stove and heating it up. As he shoveled cutlets onto the pan and shuffled them as the sizzle rose, a scuffle came from the hallway. All other matters fell away when lance turned and saw his mama, still looking thirty, standing in the doorway to kitchen. The tears where already swelling in her eyes and she looked like she was going to collapse with one hand grasping her apron and the other the TV remote. No doubt they had only just heard the latest news on the paladins return to earth.

"Oh my boy." She whispered, sending chills down Lance's spine. "Oh, Hijo."

They launched themselves at each other in a mess of tears and laughter.

His mama swept her thumb over the most prominent scar running slightly across his dirty cheek.

"How I've missed you."

"I missed you too, mama."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Often times things have to get as bad as they can get before you realize you need to do something to make it better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What this? A second chapter the next day!!!??? Yep!!!.....
> 
>  
> 
> I have no life

 

 

Lance and his mama spent the night eating a dinner made for one, talking and laughing amongst a painful silence. Soon, the older women fell into the first peaceful sleep she had in five years on the old musty couch next to her long-lost son. Lance took their dishes to the sink. He stood and left her snoring, and went to stand over the kitchen sink, holding himself up by the counter top feeling like the weight of the earths gravity could crush him.

He looked up into the black expanse of his brothers' garden, visibly flourishing through the shadows of the night, he looked too long and for a moment he thought he saw yellow eyes glaring at him from past the edge of the forest beyond their yard. His heart fell into a coma for a terrifying second before Lance forced himself to look away, clutching his head, reminding himself where he was - earth - and the threat was over.

But something in him just screamed for action. Looking down, tracing the small scars and dark patches on his weathered knuckles, he found his hands shaking. He shoved both retired weapons into torn jacket pockets and turned away from the window.

Slowly, he wandered from the kitchen into the long hallway between him and the door, the stairs to the second floor on his left facing the ocean.

Floating down the hallway, he ignored the small shrine covered in dust, leaving a small trail of cleaned rail as he walked up the Stairs.

The stairs groaned under his feet, his head popped up over the landing, seeing darkness first. Groping the wall for the light, finding it, and lighting up his past - Lance sighed with content. Right at the head of the stairs there was a tiny loft, big enough for one large red recliner and a circular area rug; here Lance would listen to his grandpa tell stories before bed, and mess with him when the old man fell asleep snoring in the same chair. Across from there was Sarah and Eric's room, the two youngest siblings. On their door was a large 'KEEP OUT' sign, for once in his life, Lance obliged, and walked past their door down the narrow, dead end hallway to the next room.

'Lance's Room' still hung from the door, painted by a toddler by the same name with assortments of greens, blues, and tan to represent the beach - stuck around it were little bi-plane stickers and rocket ships and stars carved into the wood. It had lost it's vibrancy.

Lance pushed the door open, and felt a little bit of his heart crack. It was empty.

The old rug with pictures of city roads on it was gone. The posters of garrison recruitment propaganda had been taken down and replaced with fresh paint covering the old baby blue with a dusty pink. In the corner, where his bed was, was a baby crib. On the other end, where Mateo's bed was, was a shelf full of books and baby toys.

The only thing that remained was the glow in the dark stars taped to the ceiling. Lance sighed, and closed the door.

He meandered down to the big recliner and plopped himself down, pinching his nose while everything in him tried to prevent the onset of tears that would eventually lull him to the depth of a dreamless sleep.

  
The days that followed were filled with a lovely combination of hatred and confusion and sadness and happiness. When Lance was still on earth, when he was still alive, eight people lived in this white-washed wooden house by the sea. His mama listed off the legend of them all leaving: his older brother Mateo got married and left for the mainland; his eldest sister Daniela got a job in town and an apartment as well; his two cousins moved on to 'greener pastures'; and his younger brother and sister would be almost 14 soon, and joined the nearest garrison base - the two of them receiving special training away from the main campus.

That left his mama alone. Here, in this house that was never quite, never dark, seamed almost like a ghost town now. His mama told him that they all left because he did. She cried into his arms as she cursed the garrison and the red lion for stealing her baby from her, the glue of her family.

His older brother Mateo had a baby. His mama tried to get him and his new wife to raise it her, with the thinning family, as they all did. He mama even sacrificed Lance's old room - a place that was sacred as an alter - to create a nursery. But the wife refused, and so they put a lock on the room, and pretended it didn't exist.

So Lance slept on the couch. He convinced his mama that he didn't mind, and even started redecorating and cleaning the other wise unused living room, putting plants in the giant window over looking the garden, lining the ceiling with hanging aquariums, repairing the TV, vacuuming until it felt like he never left. That's when the nightmares began.

When word spread that Lance was home, the parades of people who came marching up the driveway from the town below and beyond was more heart warming and prideful than the meddle of valor hanging in the hallway. People from the town and their kids came up the hill with baskets of fruits and bags of pies. On the fifth day of Lance being home there was an enormous cookout, filling their home with warm laughter once again.

When Mateo arrived, Lance thought the world would collapse and swallow him up. His brother and his new wife didn't get a chance to get all the way out of the car before Lance came barreling out of the yard and the two long lost brothers met with a hug so violent it nearly knocked the older sibling off his knees.

The rest of the family came like this - with eyes of tears and joy. But not all of them stayed.

Mateos wife was a bit of a drama seeker. She and their new baby went back to the mainland after only a day. Daniela, the eldest, stayed for a week before the city called her home. Lance's two younger siblings staid as long as they could, fighting the garrison left and right for time off. The three where attached at the hip - they did everything together: they spent long days making sandcastle and discovering coves along the beach until their mother whistled them home, they would saunter around town buying ice cream and scaring tourists until the street lights came on.

They spent the nights sleeping in the living room with their older brother, holding on to him as tight as they could, afraid he would vanish again if they let go.

Ultimately they spent about three weeks home before they packed their bags and reluctantly took the shuttle back to base. As soon as the two where gone from sight, something beneath Lance's lungs shifted and suddenly he couldn't breath; the ground rushed up to meet him as he writhed on the pavement gasping for air and screaming. His mama rushed out to find him convulsing in the driveway, sweating like he was being cooked. She called an ambulance, who rushed the hero to the nearest ER where a very polite and regretful doctor referred the man who had 'saved his son' in the last battle to a shrink who had a daughter in the big city the day the galra attacked who told Lance he had post traumatic stress disorder. His mama cried. Lance didn't.

They were cooking in the kitchen together later that night, pretending to be ok until they were ok, when Mateo dropped a pan by accident when Lance wasn't looking. The ex-soldier activated his bayard within in seconds and just started screaming, clutching the inactive gun in his hand until he passed out.

_He dreamt of galra generals killing his friends in front of his eyes, slitting Keith's throat and letting him bleed out on the cold floor of a prison ship. Moving from one friend to the next while the witch dug her gnarly fingernails into Lance's back and he screamed, screamed until the pain woke him._

Lance spent most nights on the couch in his clothes staring blankly at the television until sleep drug him to hell. He would wake up screaming with his mama or Mateo desperately trying to calm him down and hold him until the hiccups subsided.

_Lance dreamt of Shiro with cold galran eyes slamming his head up against a wall endlessly while someone in the background wailed like a dying animal. Escape was filled with plasma bullets zipping behind his ears until red crashed into a great explosion._

Lance spent most days sleeping on the couch while his mama putted around the house. He found he could only sleep when the sun was out, when he could hear his mama, when he could see Mateo in the garden through the huge window in the living room.

_Some purple skin was tearing into his, eyes, limbs, skin, ripping away. He screamed. No one came to rescue him this time. He died there._

Lance spent most nights sitting in reds cockpit. He would place his helmet over his tired head and turn the comm link on, intently listening to the static and crying silently just waiting for the alarm to sound. Some times he would put on his paladin armor and just look at himself in the mirror late at night for hours.

_The sound of gunshots never stopped. The cold interior of the healing pod froze his skin until it flaked away into piles of rust. He was rotting away_.

Lance spent most days walking along the beach, standing at the very edge of the waves, letting the tide come in and out, swallowing him and spitting him back out. On good days he would go swimming with Mateo, or read a book and sunbath next to where red sat vacantly in a sea cave below the house. On good days he would sleep on the floor in the living room with the TV off, cuddled under the coffee table clutching his helmet.

Lance spent most of the time crying. He always looked like he was sick.

On good days he would start talking about voltron and his friends and just never stop. Mateo would listen until he fell asleep, and his mama could never be tired out by his sons ramblings. She loved it when Lance talked about voltron. He would spout on and on about their adventures; about alien mermaids and deep sea dragons, of ancient civilizations and alternate timelines, about how much he loved and valued ever member of his team and how desperately he missed them all. He never told either of them about Keith, about how much he longed to hold him and rest his head on the other boys shoulder and listen to him ramble as his voice cracked.

No. Never that.

\--

Things started to get better and worse. At some point Lance just stopped getting dressed, he'd been wearing the same old matching pajama pants and hoodie, the blue lion slippers he stole, and a look of utter defeat plastered on his face. He got up and walked around, he watered his plants, he went and did some simple mechanic repairs and cleaning of red, he sat in a lawn chair by the ocean. He stopped talking, but occasionally he would come up behind his mother and she was cooking or cleaning or hanging up the laundry and just lay his head on her shoulder for a few moments before walking away.

That Sunday, two months after Lance had come home, he and Mateo finished hanging the laundry up on the clothes line so the two  
Where sitting in old white plastic  
Chairs in complete silence, enjoying the breeze as it came and went. Lance closed his eyes and lifted a lemonade glass to his lips.

"When I was up there in the castle ship, I used to look out the window and pretend I could see earth." Lance began, Mateo clenched his nerves. "I used to dream of this moment. But now that it's here I can't ... believe it? Or I just don't care anymore. I can't tell."

Nothing scared Mateo more than hearing Lance say he doesn't care about the ocean anymore, or the threat of not caring. He knew his little brother well enough to know that caring too much about everything was the only thing holding the boy - the man - together. In these times, more than any, Lance needed to care about something.

In that moment, Mateo had an idea. "Don't worry, Lance-y Lance. I'll make it better."

The last time Mateo said that to Lance, the little skinny boy was being bullied at school and Mateo beat them up so bad they never bothered little Lance again. The last time Mateo promised to make it better, he did. He was a man of his words, much like his sibling, and he would make it better. But Lance didn't believe him, so much to the point he dared scoff lightly to himself at the remark.

An hour of silence fell between them, until Lance nodded off.

Mateo left his younger brother, a hero, sleeping in the chair by the ocean until the sun kissed the sky goodnight, and a nightmare scourged his peace.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PSA 
> 
> I'm self projecting my experience with PTSD a little here to make it politically accurate (lol) but if u think Lance or his family is too OOC let me know 
> 
> We get some Hunk by baby up next!!

**Author's Note:**

> Oh my it IS a short boi 
> 
> (Don't worry the angst is coming)


End file.
